deviantART is a web site launched on August 7, 2000 by Scott Jarkoff , Angelo Sotira and Matt Stephens . It aims at providing a central location for artists to display their creations for feedback and public exposure. It puts an emphasis on digital works as pieces of art rather than just desktop eye candy.

It also hosts prose, poetry, photography, Flash exhibits, cell phone art, traditional art, wallpapers, fonts, stock photography, program related tutorials, skins for more than 105 applications and a recently added section for Artisan Crafts. deviantART's focus is placed not on merely being a place to store and retrieve art, but also on providing artists everywhere with a community in which they can interact - providing them with a plethora of interactive areas (like forums, a shoutbox, IRC and weblog-like journal features).

deviantART, Inc., the proprietor of the deviantArt website, also has a print service called deviantART Prints (previously known as deviantPrints). The Prints service allows a user to sell prints of their art ranging in sizes from post-card size images, to large, 20x30 inch posters. They also have recently launched a service which allows users to print their images on a wide variety of products, ranging from mouse pads to coffee mugs to puzzles.

At one point there was also a monthly online magazine known as devMAG, but this has since been discontinued.

On August 7, 2004, deviantART's fourth anniversary, deviantART v4 (aka 'Fournando') was unveiled, with quite major visual modifications (introducing tabs for more modern browsers, among other things), modifications to the message center and a real-time updating flash-based chat room, dAmn (standing for deviantART Messaging Network).

As of March 6, 2005, deviantART has approximately 10,686,260 deviations (art pieces) with one new deviation (piece of art) every few seconds. It also has over 1 million deviants (users), making it one of the largest communities on the internet.

As of yet, their search engine is only available to subscribers, but hopefully that will soon be modified.

deviantART as a Corporation

In recent years, deviantART, Inc., made its transition into a more transparent profit-driven corporation (with the newly revamped store and several other revenue-generating enterprises, including more invasive advertisements). In April 2003 deviantART, Inc. was revealed to have been a for-profit corporation from its inception (instead of having, for instance, started out as a volunteer made website such as Elfwood or GFXArtist).

With the introduction of deviantART v3 on 7 August 2003, at least two features were removed for non-paying members/subscribers: 1. the ability to search through submission (dA claims it causes a massive slowdown) and 2. the ability to view artwork thumbnails in the user's message centre.

There have also been minor concerns regarding deviantART Prints, due to its relatively high mark-up (50% of profit, or 90% for free users).

Copyright Issue

There has been controversy about deviantART, Inc.'s use of uploaded art as the license all "deviants" agree to upon signing up for website is written like other legal documents and as such uses legalese. DeviantART, Inc.'s stated policy can be found in the Help File.

Another widely debated issue is stolen art--taking other people's artwork and claiming it as one's own. While deviantART, Inc.'s administrators do their best to find and remove stolen art, pieces do slip through. The site policy considers tracing of another picture to be original art (as tracing can be a major means by which artists improve), even if the picture is claimed to be a new sketch and not a copy. Publicly attacking "art thieves" is against the deviantART, Inc. corporate code of conduct and as such is grounds for banning.

Banishment from the Community

Sometimes users break the site policy enough to be banned from the community. Bans range from 24 hours to indefinite depending on severity. deviantART does not give refunds for subscriptions or prints accounts to banned members as they broke the contract they agreed to.

External links

• http://www.deviantart.com/ deviantART, Inc. home page.
• http://shop.deviantart.com/ deviantART, Inc. store.
• http://deviantmag.com/ deviantMAG. (defunct)
• http://spyed.deviantart.com/journal/609173/ History of deviantART, Inc. by Angelo Sotira.
• irc://irc.deviantart.com deviantART, Inc. IRC server. Official channel is #devart